Category: vampires (1)

October 26, 2008

Charlaine Harris and HBO’s True Blood

> Posted by Oline Cogdill on October 26, 2008 05:18 AM

As a critic, it is always rewarding to see an author whose work you’ve admired reach a level they deserve.

As a reader and fan – and yes, I consider myself both – it’s equally rewarding to know that others share your enthusiasm for an author.

For the past couple of years, Charlaine Harris has been getting the attention she’s long deserved. And this year, the HBO series True Blood based on her Sookie Stackhouse series opened a whole new fan base for this author.

Right now, Harris has two hardcovers on the extended New York Times best-sellers list – her novel From Dead to Worse and the short story collection Wolfsbane and Mistletoe that she co-edited with Toni L. P. Kelner and includes about a dozen other authors. She also has eight paperbacks on the extended New York Times best-sellers list.

In person, Harris is gregarious with a quick wit and an easy Southern accent. As a writer, she never fails to entertain.

I discovered Harris with her novel Shakespeare's Landlord (1996), her first Lily Bard novel. Lily Bard is a house cleaner and crime survivor who lives a solitary life in a small town. Her tenacity, her determination and the way the author shaped the character rang a bell with me. I then quickly moved on to Harris’ novels about Aurora Teagarden, a librarian with an interest in true crime literature.

Both these series were terrific but it’s when Harris branched out and created her own sub-genre in mysteries -- the Southern Vampire Mystery -- that her books really took off.

Dead Until Dark, the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, was published in 2001 and won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery. Set in Louisiana, it had a regional perspective, a lot of humor, a bit of eroticism and a plot that while included violence was really more cozy than horror.

In her novels, vampires have come out, so to speak, thanks to a synthetic blood manufactured in Japan. But not everyone is so accepting of vampires who have been know to, well, be vampires. Sookie Stackhouse, however, is sympathetic. She’s a waitress in a small town and, because of her ability to read minds, she knows what it’s like to be different.

Harris’ novels re-imagined as a series has become a perfect fit for HBO, with Sookie Stackhouse played by Oscar-winner Anna Paquin and the executive producer Alan Ball, who created the hit Six Feet Under and won an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1999 film American Beauty.